Chaos Theory:

Quotes

Natasha Lyonne:
“First of all, everyone is entitled to at least one nervous breakdown in a lifetime."
krisjohn:
"I hope we have to go through all of this crap because out of an infinite number of timelines, this is the only one where we survive. Otherwise it's hard to justify."
mightshould:
"I'm coping. That's a major accomplishment. Anything else is bonus."
Mary Rodgers:
"So I asked the shrink: When you're depressed because of actual things that are depressing, are there any drugs that can make you feel better? And he said no, which was even more depressing."
David Sedaris, Happy-Go-Lucky:
"I figured my post-college life would be pretty much like the one I'd been leading for the past decade: work some little job I didn't have to put much into, then come home and do my own stuff. It was the life that most of my friends had, and half my family." "It's a consequence of putting stuff out there--you're going to get reactions."
Kristina Marusic:
"There likely aren’t a ton of people on this planet—let alone within your geography or social circles—whose moral compass, sense of humor, Netflix addictions, dietary restrictions, and idiosyncrasies sync up with yours closely enough to make you want to hitch your wagon to them for the long-haul (and the internet is making us all even picker)."
John Oliver:
"Let this be a lesson that you absolutely don’t want to fuck with someone who has the patience, attention to detail, and sustained anger to crochet their resentment into a handmade garment."
Gail Donovan, quoted in "Knitting Yarns" in the essay "Knitted Goods"
"I love taking what is basically a long string and constructing a three-dimensional object. I love thinking about how somebody figured out how to do that!"
Amber A’Lee Frost:
"It’s not just bad for a person to rely on their weakest skills for survival; it’s unsustainable and immiserating."
Michael Che:
“You know what else makes you do crazy things? Crazy,”
August and Annie/Isaiah, "One Last Stop."
"Does it ever, like...I don't know. Make you lonely? To love somebody who can't meet you there?" "Sometimes. But, you know, that feeling?" When you wake up in the morning and you have somebody to think about? Somewhere for hope to go? It's good. Even when it's bad, it's good."
Katie Brennan:
"The Office taught me that love isn’t always an immediate burst of rainbows and butterflies; sometimes the best kind of love is a quiet, enduring, and steadfast process. When you really love someone, you know they are worth putting in time and effort. Even if you entertain the thought of someone else during the process, i.e. you get yourself a Karen, you know they can’t compare to your person. No amount of time can make that connection fade, so whether it’s consciously or subconsciously, you wait for your stars to align. It might take your company casually hosting a Casino Night, or a heartfelt post it note attached to an Office Olympics “medal,” but eventually your time comes—and when it does, it’s pretty much the best thing ever."
Jane Tyson Clement:
"We don't notice the strange way things come about while they are coming about. It is only afterwards that we see the pattern..."
"Candace Kahn," Almost Romance:
"You can't blow off a good story just because it's challenging."
Nick Cave:
"I prefer to say that I have made, for reasons of survival, a commitment to the uncertain nature of the world. This is where my heart lies. I suspect it always has."
Ted Lasso:
"I love meeting people's moms. It's like reading an instruction manual as to why they're nuts."
Ask Amy:
"My point is that you can lay out your plans, but the world might have other ideas."
supercrayon:
"But I kept thinking there’s a future me a week or a month or a year away that is through this. That future me is not plagued by uncertainty, they know what happened and they’re looking back at how things played out. I liked to think that future me was sending strength and love to present me. Sometimes now, present me in fact does send strength and love back towards past me. Your future selves know what happened. The you of a week or a month from now knows, and has already started to plan your next moves. I hope strength and love are rippling up and down the timeline between yourselves."
Christina Long (Washington Post)
“WHY ARE NONE OF MY INTERESTS WORTH ANYTHING IN DOLLARS,”
Michael Diamond:
“People get frustrated when they can’t see the future,” says Diamond. “The future looks scary if you’re telling them it’s just staying at home for the next 12 to 18 months. You shouldn’t really be that surprised when at least a fraction of them get angry."
Seanan McGuire:
"Please stop trying to solve me. I'm not a problem."
Morrie Morgan, in "Work Song" by Ivan Doig:
"I don't know any cure for being myself. The lotion for that hasn't been concocted yet."
Jason Mendoza:
“Sometimes you just gotta huck a Molotov cocktail at a drone and see what happens.”
Augusten Burroughs:
"But impossible is a concept that makes one's heart laugh and throw peanuts at the television."
Augusten Burroughs:
"Even if things aren't catastrophic now, catastrophe has always followed me. Life unfolds, right? All the time, it's unfolding, and I'm going to follow it."
Augusten Burroughs:
"My life has never really been “happily ever after.” I’ve always had conflict and disaster follow me around like a shadow, and I can’t really believe that will suddenly stop now that I’m happily living in Connecticut with three dogs. We’re just going to have to see."
Jacqui:
“If you have a job where you’re not coming home with stories, it’s time to leave. That simply is our qualification. Healthcare helps. Benefits are nice, but oh my god, how do you not come home with stories? It is the easiest qualification, but it’s true. My feeling is if you don’t have a story, it wasn’t a good day."
armeowda:
"Many people can cast their affections broad and bright as floodlights, but others of us are laser beams, and when something actually trips our attraction/affection sensors it can feel like a certain kind of instant precision strike, and it can leave a mark forever."
Stan Tatkin
"There's actually nothing more difficult on the planet than another person."
Lani Diane Rich:
"What doesn't kill you makes you stranger."
Heather Havrilesky:
"Do they let me write these words because I’m good at it, or do they let me do it because I’m an entertainingly crazy person who is slowly but surely unraveling before 50,000-to-100,000 sets of eyeballs each week?"
Justin Peters:
"The simple lesson that Millionaire taught me is that if you want to change your life—either by winning a lot of money on television or by some more prosaic means—at some point you are going to have to take a risk. Unless you are John Carpenter, you will eventually have to step into the unknown, bet on yourself, and hope that you are making the right decision."
Leslie Jones
"Women are the same as humans."
Anne Lamott:
“If you’re paying attention and making your own life as beautiful and rich and fun as it can be, you might just attract someone who’s doing the same thing,” she said. “You can give up on tracking someone down with your butterfly net.” “Never give up, no matter how things look or how long they take. Don’t quit before the miracle.”
Seanan McGuire:
"If what I say doesn’t help you, ask someone else, until you find the person whose reply tells you how to kick the damn door down."
Grangousier:
"It's 2018. There's a realistic chance of pretty much anything happening if it's ridiculous enough."
Joy:
"I feel a constant low level of stress every day, just by virtue of existing in my environment,"
Fancy Feast:
"When she was on a bad date, she would go to the bathroom, hit her nose until she got a nosebleed, and excuse herself, because it was easier to punch herself in the face than suffer the consequences of rejecting a man."
Ber:
"Get your freak on, screw the powers that would deny you."
Lee Bradford:
"Lee? Why does all this weird shit only seem to happen to you? Well, disembodied voice from nowhere-statistically, it has to happen somewhere."

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July 31, 2007

Humor lessons with the Dilbert guy

"The topic does half of your work. I look for topics that have at least one of the essential elements of humor:

Clever
Cute
Bizarre
Cruel
Naughty
Recognizable

In order for something to be funny, it has to have at least two of the six elements of humor. A story about a 7-foot 9-inch Mongolian herdsman marrying a smallish woman is bizarre all by itself. In the humor context, bizarre simply means two things you wouldn’t normally find together."

Posted on July 31, 2007 at 04:53 PM in Weird, Wild Stuff | Permalink | Comments (0)

What the heck?

Hello Kitty...transformer?

Posted on July 31, 2007 at 04:50 PM in Geekitude | Permalink | Comments (0)

Snipping balls in Sacramento.

Dog statue needs to be neutered.

"Frankly, it doesn't matter what the artist wants, or for that matter whether the lawsuit succeeds." responded Nender. "This is the will of the people... and don't ask me which people, and we're going to carry it out. If this guy doesn't want to do the work himself, we'll sneak in there at night and use a Saws-All on it."
"We cannot have intact testicles on government property. As California government officials, at least the ones on our side, will attest to, Sacramento is a testicle-free zone."
Assembly Bill AB-1634 may come before the California legislature some time again in 2008, according to supporters, but in the meantime, they say they will fight the battle their way. "The ends justify the means," said Nender. Even if the means includes vandalism.
California Department of Parks, who oversee this sort of project, did not return our calls immediately, and the Governor could not be reached for comment. However, plans to erect the monument are on hold until the lawsuit is settled or dismissed.

"It's a shame," Karen Billings, planning coordinator for the National Association for Dogs in Service (NADS) told us. "These folks just won't let it go. They're obsessed with dog testicles. That didn't sound right..."

Posted on July 31, 2007 at 04:48 PM in Weird, Wild Stuff | Permalink | Comments (3)

FARK said it first:

"Britney Spears is officially single again. Line starts ... Hey, where did everybody go?"

In praise of wasted celebrities? WTF?

"For to go to rehab, and come out of it the other end, fit and proper and back, would be to get sucked back into that doll’s life that she rejected, where she was as hot as Marilyn but as intriguing as a log. There’s no denying the poor hen has had a torrid time of late. Her soon-to-be ex-husband is trying to take her children away. Her mother and management are getting a little pissy about the fact she doesn’t have her steel-rod abs anymore. What she probably needs is to be left alone with her little sons for a while. And Britney herself does not want to go to rehab. So what OK! billed as Britney’s ‘emotional cry for help’ was probably more like an emotional ‘fuck off and leave me alone’."

I think this article is uh, missing the point as to why people also think Amy Winehouse should go into rehab. It's not a question of neutering her spirit, it's about saving it before it flushes down the toilet.

"And as far as Amy’s health and welfare are concerned – the cuts on her arms, her thinness, her alcoholism – well, the Daily Mail and the Guardian can both shut their (twinned) traps. Debbie Harry was on heroin for most of Blondie. Dusty Springfield was a desperate drunk. Billie Holliday a drug addict, an alcoholic, and a former prostitute."

And that's supposed to be good? WTF?

Posted on July 31, 2007 at 04:40 PM in Current Events and News | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh no.

Don't go there.

Posted on July 31, 2007 at 04:38 PM in Geekitude | Permalink | Comments (0)

OMG YOU SPOILED ME!!!11111!!!!

"A primary school head ruined the new Harry Potter book for pupils - by reading out the final page on the last day of term.
Youngsters looking forward to reading the best-seller over the summer holidays were left reeling as Carolyn Banfield gave the game away, reports The Sun.

But a spokesman for the local education authority said: "The school was saying goodbye to the children and staff who were leaving.
"A very small passage was carefully chosen to reflect the theme of saying goodbye. The school felt this reading would not spoil the children's enjoyment of the book."
But Margaret Morrissey, spokeswoman for the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, said: "It was totally unforgivable.
"Whether you approve of the Harry Potter phenomenon or not, it has encouraged children to read. This act will probably stop all those children reading the book."

Posted on July 31, 2007 at 04:27 PM in NaNoWriMo/Writing Stuff | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another one of those "should I have a boring day job" sorta questions...

"4 years ago, I graduated with a powerful BFA. This is mighty, and scared away all employers. In order to sooth them, I pretended to be a simple 'webmaster', and some how landed myself a job at this company.
And Luck was not done with me yet, as she made it clear I was good at this, and strangely knowledgeable. One year in, I had self-taught myself enough to leave job and work freelance part-time, as both as a web and desktop developer. This is great because I pay the bills, and have a lot of time to do the thing I like doing (the BFA is mighty) and I always seem to find enough work to prosper. Only downside - I definitely don't love the work - but it lets me live a happy life.
But - sometimes - in the dark of the night, I wonder if my luck will run out someday, that I'll find myself looking for steady work in a field I have no degree. Just a client list, and a potpourri of skills.
And I think: Maybe you should just go get that B. CS, pal, as an insurance policy. You know, while you are young and life is simple. And you'll be able to write and eat forever!
But then I think: I still want to go to Grad School for my MFA, (Which is far mightier and scarier then a BFA) and I don't want to wait until I'm old and tired to do so. I love stories, not computers!"

Posted on July 31, 2007 at 04:22 PM in Quarterlife Crisis | Permalink | Comments (0)

More fun with ComicCon

"You know what they say: It's not Comic-Con until they bring out the Lego Chewy."

Also there's an amusing endquote: "The funny thing is, my name is Jared, and I'm eating Subway," he said. "I didn't get a discount, and I'm pissed."

Posted on July 31, 2007 at 04:14 PM in Geekitude | Permalink | Comments (0)

This disturbs the hell out of me.

I'd label this with another "Oh, those wacky Japanese!" posts, but this just gets squicky.

"Cameraphones with IR night vision can be tweaked to see through clothes. Cramer Japan made these nylon and polyurethane panties that block IR, hampering the photographs."

Posted on July 31, 2007 at 04:04 PM in Feminist Chick Talk | Permalink | Comments (0)